Information gathering and exchange for any scientific, commercial, political or social purpose often requires fast and easy translation of content in order to make the universe of knowledge and ideas useful on a global scale. Computer programs that translate automatically from one language to another (“machine translation programs”) can in principle meet this need and such programs have been developed and are in continued development for a variety of languages. For formal (as opposed to informal, idiomatic, colloquial) content in well-studied languages (e.g., English, French, Spanish, German, and others), such machine translation programs work reasonably well.
However, for more-difficult or less-studied languages (e.g., Arabic), existing machine translation programs do not work well, even for formal communications (e.g., Modem Standard Arabic), and they are particularly weak in the case of informal, colloquial, and idiomatic communications. Similarly, where specificity is needed, machine translation by itself is insufficient even for well-studied languages (e.g., English, French, Spanish, German, and others). Human translators can in principle provide accurate translations for difficult languages and informal communications, but Internet applications require constant availability and quick response, which cannot be assured in the case of existing methods that use human translators.